Summary of “Orbiting Jupiter: my week with Emmanuel Macron”

Uprooted trees, roofs ripped from houses, streets blocked by mountains of debris: for three hours Emmanuel Macron, president of France, has been walking through what remains of the village of Grand Case in the sweltering, clammy heat amid the strong odour of burst sewage pipes – or in other words, of shit. Anyone who’s had their hand shaken by Macron is lost to the opposition: they’re destined to vote Macron and to convert to Macronism. It dreams of regaining that status, and he promises that with him, it can; that if France follows him, it will become as seductive and competitive as he, Emmanuel Macron, this young president and envy of the world. I spent a week with Macron and his entourage to report this article, and as it was a week of travelling – to Athens and then to Saint Martin – my conversations with Jupiter took place, logically enough, in the sky. The bids come in and the journalists are having a tough time keeping them straight when the young and dapper Macron, then a banker at Rothschild, appears and proposes his services as an adviser. In a fit of panic at being caught playing a double game – apparently advising both Le Monde and Minc at the same time – Macron rushes back into the building, runs over to the staircase and disappears. That’s the word he uses, “Metic”, and you can see why it gives rise to smiles when it’s used to describe Emmanuel Macron. Since any real destiny must imply adversity and even defeat, I went on, I wondered what form adversity and defeat could take in the life of someone like Emmanuel Macron, and how she, his wife, imagined the proverbial retreat from Russia that necessarily awaited him – because if such a fate didn’t await him, he would not be a great man, not a hero.